Cleanliness is a crucial aspect of personal and public health. While sanitation systems have improved, the presence of bacteria, viruses, and other germs still cause diseases in people worldwide. For example, the common cold virus can be spread between people by hand-to-hand contact, or picked up from surfaces on which the virus exists. The Rota virus germ that causes gastrointestinal illness can be transferred from a dry smooth surface to a clean hand for as long as 20 minutes after the surface has been contaminated. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (“SARS”), hepatitis A, meningitis, and infectious diarrhea are other common prevalent health problems.
Unfortunately, many people fail to wash their hands in public places, thereby exposing themselves to the germs that cause these illnesses by rubbing their nose or eyes after touching someone or something contaminated with the bacteria or virus. Moreover, such people can transfer this risk of infection to others since most such bacteria and viruses can be transferred by hand-to-hand contact.
Despite the proven health benefits of good hand hygiene, many people simply do not bother to wash their hands, or do so incorrectly. The bathrooms in restaurants can suffer from long lines, thereby discouraging people from taking the time to wash their hands before eating. Moreover, many food courts at malls have eliminated their restroom facilities in order to save the need to clean them. In such situations, people have nowhere to go to wash their hands. However, even in cases where people do stop to wash their hands before eating, there may be a failure to wet the hands, followed by thorough lathering of the hands with soap, so that the surfactants contained in the soap can attach themselves to the germs and dirt particles to suspend them within the hot or warm rinse water that is necessary to eliminate the harmful germs and dirt from the hands.
For those people who take the time and trouble to clean their hands with soap and water, dry paper towels are typically available in dispensers located in public bathrooms near the sink. The towels can be used to dry their hands with a trash receptacle close by for disposal of the used paper towel. U.S. Pat. No. 1,688,242 issued to Lawrence et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 2,415,588 issued to Gui; U.S. Pat. No. 1,994,394 issued to Horwitt; and U.S. Pat. No. 1,681,840 issued to Carlson disclose typical paper towel and waste basket arrangements. U.S. Pat. No. 4,788,909 issued to Stewart improves upon this simple concept by providing a wall-mounted paper towel dispenser and wastebasket whereby the person needs to step on a pedal to advance the next paper towel, which also activates a tamper in the wastebasket that compacts the volume of used towels to reduce the incidence of overflowing wastebaskets.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,644,689 issued to Arians addresses concerns over germs that might breed on the door knobs of public bathrooms. Therefore, it discloses an arrangement consisting of a paper towel dispenser located immediately above the door handle and a trash receptacle positioned immediately below the door handle. In this manner, the person who wishes to exit the bathroom can grab a paper towel and use it to grab the door handle to open the door, letting the towel drop in the trash receptacle when he releases the door handle as he walks through the open door. Of course, such a towel dispenser does nothing for cleaning the hands or killing the germs on the door handle.
U.S. Published Application 2002/0190073 filed by Hewett discloses a personal dispenser that is mounted to a bathroom wall within a private household shower, bathtub, sauna, or steam room. It provides dry tissues to a person to clear mucus out of his or her nasal passages to take advantage of moist environments within the bathroom when “nasal passages are more susceptible to such clearings.” A removable receptacle is attached to the dispenser for receiving the used tissue. A second optional dispenser provides towelettes that can be impregnated with fragrances or medical products for use in removing makeup.
Pre-moistened and disposable towelettes impregnated with a cleaning and/or disinfectant solution have now become increasingly popular in the marketplace for sanitizing one's hands and other surfaces, and are often called “wet wipes” or simply “wipes.” Accordingly, similar efforts have been made to provide dispensers for cleaning wet wipes. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,540,103 issued to Silvers illustrates a multiple-compartment bin that would be located on the floor of, for example, a home nursery or day care facility that contains new diapers, baby wipes, and a sealed receptacle for disposing of the used diapers. The wipes are stacked in a sealed compartment to keep them clean and slow down the evaporation of the cleaning solution contained in the wipes. A sanitation kit for placement on a table or counter is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,753,246 issued to Peters consisting of a container for a stack of germicidal towelettes hermetically sealed in envelopes, and a disposal bin attached to the towelette container. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 6,702,147 issued to Ashford shows a “Bedside Butler” unit for a hotel or home nightstand table that constitutes a box with two containers—one container with a sealed flap for dispensing antimicrobial wipes, and a second container for disposing of the used wipes. A door sanitation kit similar to Arians is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,508,383 issued to Lidahl et al. except that a wet towel is dispensed for covering the hand prior to grabbing the handle to open a public bathroom door. However, none of these dispenser units is portable. Likewise, in none of them is a wet wipe towelette visibly available in order to encourage a person to wash his or her hands.
Hence, all of these prior art “cleaning systems” are either located within a private, household environment, lack portability, or are sufficiently cumbersome to make it unlikely that a person would choose to carry them for use within a public forum for cleaning one's hands. Limited examples of cleaning stations positioned within public places exists. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,691,897 issued to Ashe features a pole stand for use in a public area to which is attached a wet wipe dispenser, an antimicrobial soap dispenser, and spray bottle, and a waste basket. The patent discloses that this apparatus can be used for dispensing free cleaning and sanitizing supplies to the public, and that an advertising display can be added to provide a benefit to the merchant who makes this sanitation station available to its customers. Nevertheless, such an arrangement looks relatively rickety and is subject to falling over or being accidentally tipped over. Moreover, the wet wipe dispenser, hand soap dispenser, spray bottle, and pole provide a number of surfaces that need to be kept clean so as not to detract from the sanitary appearance of such a “sanitizing stand.” In a similar vein, the open waste basket is subject to overflowing and will show any other messy garbage that is dumped in it by a customer.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,222,747 issued to Savran discloses a portable, multi-function sanitation system. It constitutes a main body having multiple compartments for holding a variety of cleaning products like spray bottles of anti-bacterial disinfectant, paper towels, tissues, and pre-moistened anti-bacterial sheets. A built-in trash receptacle receives the used cleaning products. This patent explains that the system can be used in healthcare or physical fitness environments. However, it also teaches that the sanitizing system should “substantially restrict the access of the public to the cleaning supplies contained within the housing component” and “is intended to discourage the potential for cross-contamination by excessive handling of the individual dispensing components” by the public. Thus, Savran's sanitizing system clearly is used by custodians or other staff members to clean hard surfaces in a health care or exercise facility, instead of by members of the public for cleaning their hands.
Therefore, there is a need for a self-contained, integrated hand and surface sanitizing wipe dispensing system that can be located inside restaurants, cafeterias, diaper changing stations, ballparks, casinos, petting zoos, kitchens, restrooms, and any other public or work areas where good hand hygiene is important, and soap and water are not readily available. The opportunity to grab a wet wipe to clean one's hands and quickly dispose of the wipe after use is convenient and may even remind the person to clean his or her hands. Good hand hygiene does not take much time or effort when it is convenient, and it offers great benefits in terms of preventing illness and the spread of infectious diseases.